Reprinted from the summer 2023 issue of The Ohio Family Physician
By: Sarah Cunningham, DO, Community Health Care
In 2021, the United States Surgeon General declared medical misinformation, in the setting of COVID-19, a serious threat to public health. As defined, medical misinformation is a statement that is not based on current scientific consensus. These statements can mask medical fact, amplify mistrust, and cause confusion in the public’s perception of health. Platforms such as TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and the news provide outlets for the spread of these types of misstatements.
While medical consensus can be as easily found as the misinformation, the ability of the patient to filter fact from the surrounding ‘noise’ is a major challenge to family physicians. A 2022 article in Nature Reviews Psychology reviewed the psychological drivers of misinformation.1 Specifically, it explores the emotional aspect of interpreting information. People are finding their identities in groups with beliefs similar to themselves. They are relying on intuition and emotion to form their medical opinion, rather than scrutinizing the credibility and the quality of information.
The advantage primary care professionals possess, as perhaps the patients’ only conduit to the standard of care in the face of overwhelming misinformation, is the patient-physician relationship. As this relationship strengthens overtime, the physician and patient can explore the patient’s fears, beliefs, and emotional connection to the information. Primary care must now use this rapport to teach patients to filter and interpret information on the internet.
TikTok users are reporting their own stories, medical mismanagement, and offering medical advice in short, exciting, and eye-catching segments. These creators also have the advantage of not having to cite sources. Patients arrive in medical offices with a sense of mistrust for physicians and healthcare, and confusion about what is true. Unfortunately, due to this misinformation, they often arrive with preconceived notions of diagnosis and care management based on Google and TikTok “research.”
Again, family physicians must communicate with their patients in a way that will reassure them of evidenced-based medical decision making. We might be challenged to present our resources and scientific consensus in order to reassure the patient. We should consider accommodating additional time into our busy schedules to address misinformation and to directly address sources from TikTok and vague Google searches. In my experience, direct confrontation of these beliefs with patients can paradoxically cause a reinforcement in medical myths. However, building upon the physician-patient relationship through motivational interviewing and reviewing guidelines has been successful when combating misplaced information. Empathy is a core tenant of family medicine, and we need this now more than ever. It is easy to become frustrated and disillusioned when confronted with social media sourced medicine. We must empathize with our patients’ overwhelming emotion towards the immense volume of information on the internet and understand how frustrated they must be trying to interpret the information without the medical background.
We are lucky, as family physicians, to have strong relationships with our patients. We are once again called to the frontlines to fight the battle of misinformation and to guide healthcare in the United States away from mistrust and misinformation, and towards high quality medical information for the public.
References available on the Ohio Academy of Family Physicians website.